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- Avila, Martin, 1972
(författare)
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Devices. On Hospitality, Hostility and Design
- 2012
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This thesis studies and speculates upon the interrelations of artefacts with human and nonhuman agents. These interrelations form assemblages, some of which have emergent properties, becoming manifestations of processes that we cannot fully control or understand. The work started by exploring the theme of hospitality and hostility with the ambition to better understand the ecological complexity of the design process and its results. As an assemblage, this work combines different literary, philosophical and theoretical discourses and traditions with experimental design in order to develop and articulate the concept of device. A device organizes, arranges, frames our environment and thereby defines and limits possibilities of relation. Since relations can only be thought through a so-called natural language such as English, they must be taken into consideration through the process of languaging, understood by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela as communication about communication”, and as the most characteristic feature of the human species. My focusing on linguistic and biological phenomena is a response to this concern, in an attempt to understand how this process influences our perception of the world. Through a series of design projects, the thesis examines the potential range of an artefact’s relations. It does so by exploring grammatical associations that affect design onceptualizations, creating tools (prepositiontools) as well as studying and articulating forms of symbiosis that an artefact might develop in and with its environment (¡Pestes!).
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| 2. |
- Bärtås, Magnus, 1962
(författare)
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You Told Me – work stories and video essays : Verkberättelser och videoessäer
- 2010
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- You Told Me is a practice-based research project and consists of three video biographies (the Who is…? series), and two video essays (Kumiko, Johnnie Walker & the Cute (2007), Madame & Little Boy (2009), an introduction with a contextualization and methodology of the field, and three essays. The dissertation is an observation and analysis of certain functions and meanings of narration and narratives in contemporary art, as well as being an experiment with roles, methods, actions, and narrative functions in an artistic medium – the video essay. Using the methods of “pilgrimage” (Chris Marker) and essayistic practices, and by revisiting and retelling biographies, this work tries to find a place in between collective and personal memory. During the practical process and the reflective theoretical work the different elements or instances of the video essay are identified: the subject matter, the images (the representation), the artist/author, the narrative/text, and the narrator/voice. In documentary film the lack of natural correspondence between these entities is often dissolved or denied – this work instead exposes the instances as separate units. A question arises: What alternative roles can be established between these elements, for example by negotiation and transference between them? The methodological part of the text focuses on the conceptual invention made during the process, which I have called work story [verkberättelse]. A work story is a written or oral narrative about the forming of materials, immaterial units, situations, relations, and social practices that constitutes, or leads to, an artwork. By discussing analogies between storytelling, collecting, and biographical accounts together with examples from conceptual art, the dissertation shows how the work story is not only crucial for the understanding of the artwork but that the act of making and the very order or sequence in which the making proceeds often have symbolic, metaphorical, metonymical, political, and even epistemological meanings. In an extended form a work story disseminates meaning rather than capturing it. This is the essayistic work story that permits a writer/artist to wander off and touch upon a subject as if in passing, reproducing its neglected genealogy and destiny in the detailed materiality of the work story.
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| 3. |
- Hållander, Frida
(författare)
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Vems hand är det som gör? : En systertext om konst/hantverk, klass, feminism och om viljan att ta strid
- 2019
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Konstnärligt arbete (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Whose hand is making? And how can we understand craft practices in dialogue with society through making and objects? How do we understand objects that manifest resistance? This dissertation in artistic research explores craft practices within the fields of ceramics and textile, through the method and form of autoethnography, and on the basis of an intersectional perspective. It understands making as embodied experience and knowledge, conditioned, but not always bounded, by societal structures, and it documents the resistance against, and the resilience of, repressive structures, in dialogues and struggles where objects gain agency.It is an examination that moves between the bookishness of libraries and historical trajectories on the one hand and making as collective practice on the other, the latter represented in what this study defines as case studies of making. The study creates the term “together-making” to describe and analyse collective craft practice as simultaneously a method of research and of making as a potentially political and socially-conscious act.Through two case studies of making the study assembles an archive of willfulness. In the first case study of making, ceramic practice and historical objects emanating from feminist and anti-slavery movements, are explored through a process of together-making, putting together the exhibition From Pottery to Politics in 2016. In the actual exhibition, further ceramic objects from Swedish twentieth century come into play to re-direct the shape of the exhibition, exemplifying the ways in which this study understands objects as manifest, material politics inciting response.The second case study of making, takes off from the geographical area known as »de sju häraderna«: a centre for Swedish textile manufacture and home-based industry since the seventeenth century. Focusing on a group of local seamstresses who organized Sweden’s first women’s football series in the 1960s – Öxabäck IF – the study investigates textile objects in dialogue with society reflected through the textile history of labour and feminist political movements in the nineteenth and twentieth century. This case study also documents the process of research through together-making, and the exhibition Öxabäck IF – Without You no Tomorrow, 2016.
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| 4. |
- Medbo, Mårten, 1964
(författare)
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Lerbaserad erfarenhet och språklighet
- 2016
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During the course of the twentieth century, a doubt emerged – first within visual arts, and later also within crafts – where the relevance of the traditional way of making art was addressed, as were thoughts on what was termed ‘empty shape’. The notion that shape in itself was no longer artistically valid is closely linked to notions of materiality as hindrance, and immateriality as freedom – all of which have had a major influence on contemporary visual arts and crafts, in general, and, more specifically, on what I term ‘theory-practice’ within the field of crafts. During the past few decades, increasing proof of this influence on the field of crafts as a whole has also been experienced. As a ceramist expressing myself through clay, form has never been empty, and clay never a hindrance, and my dissertation is an attempt to put materiality as hindrance, and immateriality as freedom, in context, as well as to reflect upon questions related to their emergence and what impact they have within the field of crafts. My point of departure here is my own experience as an artist and ceramist, where inquiring and exploring takes places through practical knowledge. I argue that there is no such thing as immateriality in art and that all artistic expression requires bodily-situated craft skill of some kind in order to be materialised and communicated, as well as to take place in the world. I also argue that art should be seen as what I term ‘language-practice’. Through this practice I craft the concept of ‘clay-based language-ness’ and ‘language- like-ness’ in order to come as close as possible to describing, in words, the kind of communication I wish to create as a ceramist, as well as what art-making (‘art-crafting’) constitutes when conceptual artists create their art. Regarding crafts as a language-practice, however, conflicts with the theory that is setting the tone as well as leading the field of crafts today. I therefore wish, and propose, to find a way out of this conflict-ridden situation. As part of this endeavour, I present the text-based part of the dissertation and the clay-based part of the dissertation – side by side.
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